Tag: evidence-based teaching

The Importance of Vigilance in Teaching

Posted on by richardjamesrogers

An article by Richard James Rogers (Award-Winning Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management and The Power of Praise: Empowering Students Through Positive Feedback). This blog post has been beautifully illustrated by Pop Sutthiya Lertyongphati.

My promise to you: I never use generative AI to create, edit, or enhance my blog posts. All of my content is original.

After writing various posts for this blog for almost 11 years (yes….it’s been that long, I started in 2015!), it often becomes difficult to think of topics to write about. After all, with hundreds of articles on this site (which you can find at my blog index), almost every possible topic to do with education has been covered.

Today’s topic, however is one of those brought on by a sudden realisation, followed shortly by a mental note that etched the following words deep into my mind: Why haven’t I written about this before?.

Vigilance is such a central theme of effective teaching that I am surprised at myself for not writing a blog post about it until now.

So, if you’re the person who’s been waiting for 11 years for me to finally say something about vigilance, then today is your lucky day!

What does ‘vigilance’ mean for teachers?

Vigilance essentially means noticing things, then taking action. When we are vigilant as teachers, we ‘nip things in the bud’, to borrow a British idiom. It means that we spot things, and then we do something about the things we have spotted.

My favourite quote on the importance of vigilance in teaching comes from Dylan Wiliam:

“Responsive teaching… is contingent on constantly eliciting evidence of student understanding and acting on it.” – Wiliam, D. (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Vigilance shouldn’t just apply to “eliciting evidence of student understanding”, however. It must be applied to EVERYTHING we do as teachers, and especially the four ‘domains’ that I will now outline.

Vigilance Domain #1: Data

As I explained in my post entitled Using Data to Empower Students, we are usually very good at collecting data as teachers, but we are often not vigilant enough to take action after we have analysed that data.

Things to notice and take action on include:

  • Dips and rises in attainment and progress over time. Use this data to set targets for students, praise students regularly, utilise ‘subtle reinforcement’ and intervene when poor performance is noticeable.
  • Attendance and punctuality data, as we often wait too long to take action when concerns are flagged. This one is pretty important, as it could be related to safeguarding matters.
  • Predicted grades vs actual grades. CAT4 and other enrolment data are often collected and aggregated brilliantly by schools, but does every teacher understand how to use this data? Has training been provided on how predicated grades should be assigned, and are reflections curated when actual grades don’t match predicted grades? There are opportunities here for deep learning at a school-wide level to take place.

Vigilance Domain #2: Safeguarding

It goes without saying that any safeguarding concerns you have about a child must be noticed and reported immediately to the designated person for child protection at your school. Things to look out for include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Sudden changes in a student’s behaviour
  • Disheveled/unkempt appearance of students at school. Unwashed clothes, bad smells, students appearing very tired, etc.
  • Sexual language/innuendo/behaviour expressed
  • Bruises, scars or other visible injuries children may have
  • Sudden decreases in attainment
  • Disclosures: Of course, if any student discloses something to you that raises a safeguarding red flag, or if you overhear a disclosure (e.g. students talking amongst themselves), then that must be reported.

Of course, if you spot any of the above it does not automatically mean that a child is at risk, but it is important to report any issues, however small, as the information you’ve acquired may be a crucial missing piece in the ‘larger story’ of a safeguarding picture.

Vigilance Domain #3: Behaviour

When most teachers hear the word ‘vigilance’, they immediately think of behaviour as the first domain to which ‘nipping things in the bud’ must be applied. There’s good reason for this: on a day-to-day basis, vigilance will be most often applied to behaviour management.

Teaching has changed a lot since I started my career in 2005 as a PGCE student and trainee teacher. Back then, there weren’t as many requirements to be so locked in to my computer as I am today. There weren’t really any VLEs, such Google Classroom or Moodle, to upload materials to. Email existed, but it wasn’t as big a part of a teacher’s life as it is today. EdTech, in it’s current form, was also in it’s infancy.

How things are different now! As teachers, we are expected to do so many things digitally, and this creates a challenge from a vigilance perspective. Teachers often find themselves working on computers whilst they’ve set a task for their students to complete (and, you can include me in that category, too). This is fine, so long as vigilance is still in place:

  • Every few minutes or so, walk around the classroom to check that your students are completing the assigned task. I would not advise spending long periods working on your computer, oblivious to what the students are doing.
  • Use verbal check-ins, such as “Group 2, how’s that going?”, “Remember, everyone, to include 10 slides minimum in your presentation”, and so forth. This signals to the class that you are still present, and watching.
  • Digital check-ins can work well. Any form of cloud-based task, such as Google slides and docs, Canva projects, MS Teams work, and so forth can be shared with you as the teacher. You can log in to that work as the students are doing it, and offer real-time feedback.
  • Utilise live-marking strategies (very powerful).

Spotting students who are off-task early, and taking action, is a classic example of ‘nipping things in the bud’. You deal with the issue in its infancy, before it grows into something that is more difficult to manage. My blog post entitled Behaviour Management Basics goes into more detail on this.

Vigilance Domain #4: Professional Intelligence

Information related to your students….

  • Hobbies
  • Interests
  • Achievements outside of school
  • Birthdays
  • Upcoming events
  • Career aspirations
  • Prior achievements
  • Life outside of school

….can all be used in the rapport-building process, and….rapport is an essential quality to build if you want to be an effective teacher. Strike up conversations with your students in which you discuss the above things, with the aim of being an encouraging mentor. Take a professional interest in the entire life of each of your students, whilst maintaining professional distance of course, and you’ll be amazed at how this will benefit your classroom management dynamics.

Key takeaways

  • Vigilance means noticing things, then taking action.
  • We need to collect and analyse data (such as attainment and progress), then use that for target setting and interventions.
  • Safeguarding red flags must always be noticed and acted upon immediately. Talk with your schools designated person for child protection if you are unsure about how to do this.
  • Behaviour management is heavily dependent on vigilance. It’s always better to ‘nip poor behaviour in the bud’ before it grows.
  • Take a professional interest in the entire life of each of your students, and use that information for rapport-building. This comes under the broad umbrella concept of ‘Subtle Reinforcement’.

How Interleaving Works: Universal Strategies for Secondary School Classroom Practice

Posted on by richardjamesrogers

An article by Richard James Rogers (Award-Winning Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management and The Power of Praise: Empowering Students Through Positive Feedback). This blog post is illustrated by Pop Sutthiya Lertyongphati.

Accompanying podcast episode:

In my twenty years of teaching, I’ve come across numerous pedagogical techniques designed to boost student learning, but few have been as transformative as interleaving. This technique, backed by cognitive science, has the power to enhance long-term retention and application of knowledge: yet it remains underutilised in many secondary school classrooms. Today, I want to explore generalisable rules for interleaving (a structured approach that any secondary school teacher can apply) and one that, to my knowledge, has never been formally outlined before. Out of all of the blog posts I have written to-date, this one has taken me the largest amount of time to research, collate and delineate. I hope that secondary school teachers everywhere will find this guide to be highly practical and transformative. A full bibliography of the research I have cited can be found at the end of this article.

What is Interleaving?

Let’s begin by first exploring this fundamental question: What is Interleaving?

Interleaving is a cognitive learning strategy that involves mixing different topics or types of problems within a single learning session, as opposed to traditional blocked practice, where students focus on one topic at a time before moving on to the next. Research suggests that interleaving improves students’ ability to discriminate between problem types, enhances problem-solving skills, and leads to stronger long-term retention (Rohrer & Taylor, 2007). As many of my readers will remember from an earlier blog post of mine, problem-solving is often a key characteristic of lessons in which deep learning (as opposed to surface learning) takes place.

From my own experience, I first stumbled upon the power of interleaving when preparing my Year 11 students for their IGCSE Maths exams. Rather than structuring revision lessons in the typical topic-by-topic format, I began mixing algebra, geometry, and statistics problems within the same lesson. Initially, students found this challenging, but over time, their ability to recall and apply concepts in different contexts improved dramatically. This worked particularly well when students had finished several topics during their revision sessions, prior to me bringing it all together within interleaved lessons.

The Science Behind Interleaving

Cognitive scientists suggest that interleaving works because it forces students to retrieve and apply knowledge in varied contexts, preventing passive learning and improving memory consolidation (Bjork & Bjork, 2011). A landmark study by Pan et al. (2019) found that interleaved practice led to better exam performance in secondary school students, particularly in subjects like mathematics and science where problem-solving skills are crucial.

Generalisable Rules for Interleaving in Secondary School Classrooms

Despite its effectiveness, interleaving can be difficult to implement without a structured approach. Based on research and my own classroom experiences, I propose the following generalisable rules for effective interleaving in secondary education:

#1: Mix, Don’t Isolate

Traditionally, subjects are taught in blocks, but interleaving requires deliberately mixing topics within lessons or across study sessions. For example:

  • In a Maths lesson, combine algebra, probability, and geometry problems instead of teaching them separately.
  • In Science, integrate questions on biology, chemistry, and physics in practice exercises.
  • In English, interleave different types of writing tasks (e.g. descriptive writing, persuasive essays, and analytical responses) within the same lesson.

In my experience, I have found that interleaving works best if you can connect the separate topics in some way, or if the topics themselves are closely related. In certain cases, project work in groups can lend itself well to interleaved exploration, provided that source material has been directly taught beforehand.

#2: Vary the Practice

Students should not only mix topics but also engage in different types of questions and formats. This can be achieved through:

  • Interleaved homework: Assign practice problems from multiple topics rather than focusing on just one.
  • Mixed-question assessments: Instead of unit-based tests, include questions from previous topics to reinforce cumulative learning. If you really must use unit tests, then try to include interleaved questions, or at least some questions that assess knowledge gained in previous units.
  • Diverse activities: Use a combination of retrieval tasks, discussion-based learning, and problem-solving exercises.

#3: Space it Out

Interleaving is most effective when combined with spaced practice (also known as distributed practice), where content is revisited periodically rather than crammed in one session. This can be structured as follows:

  • Weekly review sessions that incorporate topics from the past month.
  • Do Now tasks at the beginning of lessons that include mixed-topic retrieval questions. Live-quiz apps can be utilised if you wish to incorporate a more lively, competitive and upbeat way of implementing these.
  • Revision timetables that revisit concepts in a cyclic manner.
  • Learning journals that are filled in, and checked, on a regular basis.

For more information about the Spaced Practice Effect, and how to implement it (beyond the advice I have given in this blog post), then check out this excellent guide by Benjamin Keep.

#4: Scaffold the Difficulty

Interleaving is challenging, and students often find it frustrating at first. To ease them into it:

  • Start with low-stakes quizzes that mix concepts gradually.
  • Provide worked examples before asking students to attempt mixed questions.
  • Allow for collaborative problem-solving before independent practice.

Scaffolding is an interesting and distinct domain of pedagogy in its own right and must not be ignored when designing an interleaved curriculum. Within a lesson, or sequence of lessons, my suggestion for good implementation would be as follows:

  1. Provide a quick starter: Use the Three As if you like, or these great starter activities.
  2. Use direct instruction, starting easy then gradually increasing the level of ‘cognitive load‘. Unfortunately, direct instruction has been tarnished with a bad reputation in recent years due to the move towards ‘student-centered’ learning, exploration and phrases such as ” Don’t be a ‘sage on a stage'” and “Don’t ‘spoon feed’ the students” being bandied around school staff rooms (I’ve heard them all!). However, the research suggests that direct instruction, especially when the teacher is mindful of Dual Coding strategies, has a significant and positive effect on learning outcomes.
  3. Go through interleaved worked examples.
  4. Allow students to work in small groups to complete mixed questions.
  5. Provide opportunities for independent practice.

#5: Explicitly Teach the Strategy

Students often resist interleaving because it feels harder than traditional blocked practice. However, just as with metacognitive strategies, we should be encouraging our learners to think about how they think. It’s crucial to explain:

  • Why it works: Share kid-friendly summaries of research evidence on its benefits (use this blog post if you wish).
  • How it mimics real-world application: In exams and real life, problems don’t come in neatly organised sets. If you are able to, then provide past-paper questions to demonstrate the fact that the students will be assessed, one day, in an interleaved way.
  • How to use it independently: Encourage students to interleave their own revision by mixing topics in flashcards, self-quizzes, and study sessions.

Interleaving in Action: My Experience

When I first implemented interleaving, I noticed initial pushback from students. They were used to structured, predictable learning sequences and found interleaved practice to be more demanding. However, after just a few weeks, their ability to transfer knowledge across topics improved significantly. By the time mock exams arrived, they were better equipped to handle unfamiliar questions and apply concepts in novel ways.

For example, in my IBDP Maths AI class several years ago, I introduced interleaved problem sets that combined differentiation, probability, and trigonometry in a single assignment. Students initially struggled but later reported that the varied practice helped them identify links between topics: a crucial skill for higher-order problem-solving.

Final Thoughts: A Call to Action

Interleaving is a powerful, research-backed technique that every secondary school teacher should consider. While it may require a shift in lesson planning, the long-term benefits in terms of deep learning, retention, and problem-solving ability are well worth the effort.

In my book, The Quick Guide to Classroom Management: 45 Secrets That All High School Teachers Need to Know, I discuss how structuring lessons effectively can have a profound impact on student outcomes. Implementing interleaving is just one example of how thoughtful classroom strategies can positively engineer student success.

What are your thoughts on interleaving? Have you tried it in your classroom? Let me know in the comments!

Bibliography

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